An appeal is planned for a family of homeschoolers the Obama administration wants to deport to their home country of Germany to face persecution from education officials there who seek fines and jail for such individuals.

The word comes today from officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association, who have been arguing on behalf of the Romeike family since they fled Germany in 2008 and were granted asylum in the U.S. in 2010 by Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman.

The Obama administration was unhappy with that decision and appealed, and the grant was rescinded by the Board of Immigration Appeals in 2012.

A panel from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently heard arguments on the dispute, and ruled today that the asylum request should be denied.

“We believe the Sixth Circuit is wrong, and we will appeal their decision,” said Michael Farris, HSLDA founder and chairman. “America has room for this family, and we will do everything we can to help them.”

The court said that the Romeikes had not made a sufficient case, and that the United States has not opened its doors to every victim of unfair treatment.

While the judges admitted the U.S. Constitution recognizes the rights of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children, they refused to concede that the harsh treatment of religiously and philosophically motivated homeschoolers in Germany, including fines, jail and the loss of custody of their children, amounts to persecution within the laws on asylum.

“Germany continues to persecute homeschoolers,” said Mike Donnelly, HSLDA director of international affairs. “The court ignored mountains of evidence that homeschoolers are harshly fined and that custody of their children is gravely threatened – something most people would call persecution. This is what the Romeikes will suffer if they are sent back to Germany.”

WND has reported on the case since its inception. Just weeks ago, HSLDA officials launched a petition on a White House website to seek help. They White House policy is to provide a response to petitions that collect more than 100,000 signatures, but nothing has been heard from the Oval Office even though it passed that threshold more than a month ago.

“While whitehouse.gov has seen petitions ranging from serious to comical – including creating a ‘Death Star’ and requesting congressmen to wear sponsorships like NASCAR drivers – HSLDA believes that the Romeike petition is of utmost importance because a family’s human rights are at stake,” the HSLDA said in an announcement about the effort.

Farris warned of the positions being adopted by Obama.

“When the United States government says that homeschooling is a mutable choice, it is saying that a government can legitimately coerce you to change this choice,” Farris said. “In other words, you have no protected right to choose what type of education your children will receive. We should understand that in these arguments, something very concerning is being said about the liberties of all Americans.”

“I’m glad Obama wasn’t in charge in 1620,” Farris said in an appearance on Fox and Friends. “The government’s arguments in this case confuse equal persecution with equal protection and demonstrate a serious disregard for individual religious liberty. I really wonder what would’ve happened to the Pilgrims under this administration.”

Donnelly said the organization got involved after learning that the Romeikes were being fined thousands of dollars – and plans were made by the government to put a lien on their home.

“I knew that this was only a starting point, and that it was very likely that very severe action would soon follow. Homeschooling is not tolerated in Germany and Uwe [Romeike] said he might have to leave the country. We are privileged to represent these modern day Pilgrims.”

The German Supreme Court said because of the issues of socialization, the state, not parents, decides how children are educated.

“This is dangerous precedent. One that Americans ignore at their peril,” Donnelly said.

“This is the nightmare of German parents – even non-homeschooling parents have suffered by being fined and sent to jail seeking to exercise reasonable discretion over their children’s education such as opting them out of certain objectionable presentations of material that violates their convictions. German states don’t tolerate differences in education – they just want uniformity. But fundamental human rights and even international law requires Germany to respect the superior right of parents over education of children.”

WND has reported on the trials of the Romeikes since police officers appeared on their doorstep in Germany in 2006 to drag their children to a local public school.

Attorneys for the Justice Department argued before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that a government has every right to demand that parents send their children to public schools, even if the school’s teaching conflicts with the family’s religious beliefs.

Farris found the position adopted by the Obama administration startling.

The administration contends subjecting children to those teachings for several dozen hours a week doesn’t violate any religious or human rights, he noted.

“Does anyone think that our government would say to Orthodox Jewish parents, we can force your children to eat pork products for 22-26 hours per week because the rest of the time you can feed them kosher food?” he wrote in a website commentary.

He warned that while the case involves German homeschoolers, there’s an application for Americans.

“The prospect for German homeschooling freedom is not bright. But we should not reserve all of our concern for the views of the German government. Our own government is attempting to send German homeschoolers back to that land to face criminal prosecutions with fines, jail sentences, and removal of custody of children,” he said.

“We should understand that in these arguments by the U.S. government, something important is being said about our own liberties as American homeschoolers. The attorney general of the United States thinks that a law that bans homeschooling entirely violates no fundamental liberties.”

Farris pointed out the asylum law allows a refugee to remain in the U.S. due to the threat of persecution for any of several reasons, including for religious reasons or being part of a “particular social group.”

But Attorney General Eric Holder’s official position is that the family doesn’t qualify, even though the Supreme Court of Germany already publicly declared the purpose of the German ban on homeschooling was to “counteract the development of religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies.”

The Obama administration position is that it is irrelevant that the children were “bombarded with negative influences” in the German public schools that included “alleged teaching of evolution, abortion, homosexuality, disrespect for parents, teachers, and other authority figures, disrespect for students, bullying, witchcraft, disrespect for family values and ridicule of Christian values.”

The German goal, Farris explained, is “to prohibit people who think differently from the government (on religious or philosophical grounds) from growing and developing into a force in society.”

“It is thought control. It is belief control. It is totalitarianism dressed up in politically correct lingo,” he said.

But he said the what should be alarming for Americans is the “state of the position of our government at a very high level.”

He said the executive branch is arguing that it’s no problem to ban homeschooling.

“There are two major portions of constitutional rights of citizens – fundamental liberties and equal protection. The U.S. attorney general has said this about homeschooling. There is no fundamental liberty to homeschool. So long as a government bans homeschooling broadly and equally, there is no violation of your rights.

“A second argument is revealing. The U.S. government contended that the Romeikes’ case failed to show that there was any discrimination based on religion because, among other reasons, the Romeikes did not prove that all homeschoolers were religious, and that not all Christians believed they had to homeschool.

“The central problem here is that the U.S. government does not understand that religious freedom is an individual right. One need not be a part of any church or other religious group to be able to make a religious freedom claim. Specifically, one doesn’t have to follow the dictates of a church to claim religious freedom – one should be able to follow the dictates of God Himself,” Farris wrote.

“The United States Supreme Court has made it very clear in the past that religious freedom is an individual right. Yet our current government does not seem to understand this. They only think of us as members of groups and factions. It is an extreme form of identity politics that directly threatens any understanding of individual liberty.”

Germany is notorious for its attacks on homeschooling families. In one case several years ago, a young teen was taken from her family and put into a psychiatric ward because she was homeschooled.

Fines and even jail terms are common for those who offend the mandatory public school indoctrination there.

The journal article said, “”The BIA should find that all German homeschoolers comprise a ‘particular social group,’ regardless of whether the Romeike family successfully established a claim of ‘well-founded fear of persecution.’”

The problem is that a Nazi-era law in Germany in 1938, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, eliminated exemptions that would provide an open door for homeschoolers under the nation’s compulsory education laws.

Wolfgang Drautz, consul general for the Federal Republic of Germany, previously wrote on the issue in a blog, explaining the German government “has a legitimate interest in countering the rise of parallel societies that are based on religion.”

As WND reported, the German government believes schooling is critical to socialization, as is evident in its response to another set of parents who objected to police officers picking up their child at home and delivering him to a public school.

“The minister of education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling,” said a government letter. “… You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. … In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement.”